Industrial Design Education in Iran:A case study for developing a new syllabus

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the educational system of Industrial Design in Iran. It presents a study which performed to develop a new framework of educational program. Industrial Design is one of the important factors for achieving economical stability in developing countries. Therefore, design education will play an important role in generating the manpower. It is also very important to promote design culture in the industry that will absorb it in future.

Industrial Design in Iran has been educated in Bachelor and Master courses in ten universities in Tehran and five other cities. All these universities follow the same plan and syllabus in Bachelor of Industrial Design courses. This syllabus contains 135 modules which are educated during four years. One hundred and fifteen of these modules are related to design field and twenty of them are Liberal Arts that are same in all different courses. This syllabus has been established since 1995 and all universities were obliged to follow it during last 15 years. Obviously the syllabus is very old and needs up to dating. In addition some of the universities have potentials to expand their educational systems in specific fields of Industrial Design. In order to develop a new syllabus, there was a need for performing a comprehensive study.

For this study, the current syllabus was investigated and compared with the syllabus of other universities in the world. The world best forty four design universities and institutes were selected from the business week’s worldwide ranking and their syllabus and modules were studied. Among these universities, nine of them which presented relatively complete information on their website were selected. The modules were classified in two levels. Due to the nature of Design, which contributes in both art and science, first level, includes Art, Science, Art and Science combination and liberal materials. In second level each part divided in two. Fundamental arts and design basics were result of dividing Art. Applied science and Laboratory lessons were the two parts of Science filed. The Art and Science combination part was separated in specific design projects and portfolio. The Liberal part was consisting of selective courses and complement lessons. The number of modules were calculated in each category and analyzed by Excel software. The distributions of the modules for each university were studied. The results showed that American universities among these nine universities have almost similar and equal distributions in classification of modules. They also showed that different Universities have different tendencies in their program. For instance, Delft University has more technological tendency while Polytechnic of Milan has more artistic tendency. For selecting a reference for benchmark, the distribution of the modules was considered. It was also compared with the current Industrial Design syllabus of Iran. Art Centre College met all these requirements and was selected as the reference. According to the syllabus and the lesson plan of Art Centre College, a draft syllabus was developed. In order to generate a new syllabus, the draft will be modified via professional meetings and questionnaires.